During the last weeks, I’ve been writing a lot of code while commuting.
Since I was working on an application that uses Facebook’s and Amazon’s APIs and I was working offline, I often found myself unable to test the code I was writing against live data.
I must confess I struggled at the beginning.
I had no chance to try out my small application while I was working on it and, generally, I had to code during 1-hour trips, waiting until I got to work/home to see whether everything was performing as expected.
The outcome? I was surprisingly productive. And I’m sure it was not just because of the absence of common distraction sources (IMs, Email, Twitter and the like).
So, what made the difference? Here are some of the insights I got from the experience.